Pushing Cloud to the Edge

Forbes published an interesting article on Dec 9. It speaks of Google’s plan to build cloud datacenters across CDN locations. The topic is close enough to my heart to warrant a post.

Cloud architecture has enjoyed massive success and growth because (a) it commoditizes access to compute resources for developers giving them an enormous boost in agility, (b) helps IT make the trade-off between CapEx and OpEx in a flexible manner, and (c) makes management and operation of compute, storage and network assets really easy and cost-effective for IT.

However, if we speed forward the next 10 years, we will look back at today’s architectures as the “mainframe era” of cloud computing. What do I mean by that? Today’s cloud architectures require large-scale for efficiency. It is hard to shrink that level of efficiency in a small enough footprint to deploy it across small datacenters, even micro datacenters, across the Internet. People and things that generate and consume data are located hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away from the “mega datacenter”. To alleviate some of the pain, the big cloud guys provide some sort of MPLS connectivity to their customers. However, a quick analysis of MPLS price trends and the growth of data traffic for the cloud will reveal a telling story of how the future cloud architectures must evolve.

When we started Midfin Systems, our guiding inspiration was the intelligence and efficiency of the mega datacenter; and we challenged ourselves to look out the next 5 years. We saw lots of small cloudlets handling M2M, smart-cities, 5G, IoT, edge analytics, and a whole host of latency sensitive applications. We challenged ourselves to make our software smart enough and lean enough to handle a cloud presence that would be 10x the size of today’s clouds. With eFabric, our goal has been to extend the frontier of the cloud to the very edge of Internet. And do it in a manner that any field-tech staff can build out POPs (Points of Presence) in minutes and get the same intelligence and efficiency as mega datacenters. We call this edge cloud!